Brooke’s Note: The performance reporting world for RIAs is much like the custody world for RIAs. Most firms simply never budge — until they do. The ones that truly seem to be captives to their vendors of these services are the firms with multiple billions in assets under management. Moving is hell, for them and their customers. So when I see four firms of this stature shoving their couches through narrow doorways and down spiral staircases, I take a look. It’s not that one competitor is tanking. These accounts were pulled from Schwab, Fortigent and Advent. It’s that Tamarac seems to be selling the intangible that is most sought — peace of mind about the future. Now it just needs to make that implicit promise tangible.

Tony Hallada likes to keep a skinny Rolodex.

The chief executive of CLA Wealth Advisors, which manages $3.9 billion, points to his monogamous relationship with Schwab Advisor Services to illustrate what he means.

It’s not that the San Francisco-based RIA custodian is perfect, it’s that Hallada has no interest in the red tape of custody polygamy. Another example of keeping it simple: all advisors on Hallada’s payroll are paid a salary.

From Hallada’s standpoint, his RIA already has enough moving parts after combining LarsonAllen and Glifton Gunderson in 2012 to create a 15-office company with 89 employees just in wealth management. The larger company, CliftonLarsonAllen LLP based in Minneapolis, has accounting as a core business.

Good company

In addition to CliftonLarsonAllen, a swath of leaders of giant RIAs looking for a new course for their technology futures have turned to Tamarac.

Beacon Pointe Advisors, which manages $7 billion out of Newport Beach, Calif.; Los Angeles-based Convergent Wealth Advisors, which manages $8.5 billion; and Freestone Capital Management LLC in Seattle, which manages (according to its ADV) $3.1 billion, have all just completed or are in the process of completing conversions to wider use of Tamarac beyond its rebalancing software.

Tamarac now serves 775 firms that manage a cumulative $375 billion of assets. Many of those firms still just use its rebalancing tool. Its full offering includes a retrofitted Microsoft Dynamics and retrofitted Schwab PortfolioCenter. Tamarac now supports 100 firms that manage $1 billion or more of assets.

These moves are not surprising to Joel Bruckenstein, producer of the T3 conferences for the RIA industry.

“ I think that the integrated approach that Tamarac takes attracts some of these big firms because they can get the greatest operational efficiencies out of it,” he says. “Some older systems do not offer the type of flexible reporting capabilities — and other functionality — that some RIA’s crave. There are still plenty of Axys users, PortfolioCenter users and until recently dbCAMs users out there who want more than their current systems offer. It is a pain to change systems, but eventually firms reach a tipping point where they have to move. When they do, some of the leading alternatives they look at are Black Diamond, Orion, and Tamarac.”

Audition platform

The executives from each of these firms, except Freestone thus far, participated in interviews to better explain their choices and the simplicity theme stood out in each case.

Still, Bancroft emphasizes that Fortigent remains the primary software the firm uses for its clients with $10 million or more in assets. The pool of clients with $10 million or less, called Independence by Convergent, are fully migrated to Tamarac and that segment represent about $500 million of assets under management. The ultra-high-net-worth unit has the $8 billion.

Un-customized

Matt Cooper, partner and president of Beacon Pointe Wealth Advisors, his firm’s aggregation partnership., says that his company became determined to find a new performance reporting partner after Schwab made a change that diminished the value of the software he was using. His RIA had been a customer of Overland Park, Kan.-based Etelligent and he loved the software developed by Jim Starcev (who worked at Etelligent from 2000 to 2008) because it allowed him to customize reports for clients. See: How Matt Cooper is getting past the 'oh, sure’ factor that came from a slow roll-out of … the other Newport Beach roll-up.

Starcev says he can only offer limited insight about what happened here. “We left Schwab fairly soon after they purchased,” he says. “I do know there were a few companies that had some challenges with reports, but not sure which companies. From Schwab’s perspective, it is much more scalable to do template reports versus custom.”

The problem, Cooper says, in addressing this custom-report issue is that he was a captive of Schwab because of how excruciatingly difficult and expensive it would be to move off of Schwab’s database. That said, he closely considered Black Diamond in Jacksonville, Fla. and Omaha, Neb.-based Orion Advisor Services, LLC and considers them both excellent alternatives.

By moving to Tamarac, Beacon Pointe was able to get its customized reports and continue on the same database.

Cooper adds that there is one other psychological factor that played on him in choosing Tamarac. As he met dozens of advisors as prospects for his roll-up, the name Tamarac kept coming up. “I’m seeing more Tamarac out there,” he says.

There was also an X factor that moved Convergent to look past its existing provider: a shift in the way it invests from lots of illiquid alternative investments to liquid ones. Tamarac is perfectly suitable for liquid alternatives whereas Fortigent was needed for reporting on more exotic investments.

“More and more of our people use liquid investments,” says Doug Wolford, president of Convergent.